Saturday, November 6, 2010

While Russ Carnahan (D-MO) has claimed victory in Missouri's Third Congressional District, Ed Martin (R) has yet to concede. The News Tribunereported Thursday: "Republican Ed Martin is demanding an investigation of possible voter fraud after narrowly losing the election for Missouri’s 3rd Congressional District to Democratic incumbent Rep. Russ Carnahan."

At the close of Tuesday evening's election tally, Russ Carnahan was leading his three conservative opponents with almost 49% of the vote (99,016). Ed split the 51% of the voters that sought to return sanity to DC with the Constitution Party's Nick Ivanovich and Libertarian Steven Hedrick. Ed was a close second to Russ having garnered the support of nearly 47% of voters. Still, he trailed Russ by almost 4,500 votes.

That's a lot of votes to make up and Ed acknowledged that Friday morning on Jamie Allman's radio show on 97.1. You can listen to Ed's remarks from the third hour of Jamie's show. Ed comes on at about 3:45 and speaks for about five minutes:

Ed's in a difficult position. Obviously, he doesn't want to be the next Al Gore, but as someone who worked to end voter fraud in St. Louis city, Ed feels an obligation to ensure a clean election. He's made three claims about Tuesday's election, but before we get into those claims, it is important to note that Russ Carnahan's sister, Robin Carnahan, is Missouri's Secretary of State. As such, she's ultimately responsible for election oversight and obviously has a conflict of interest in this instance.

“We are also calling for an investigation into the Secretary of State’s office because we had an election judge come into the St. Louis Tea Party headquarters just to vent his frustration and let us know what was going on,” Ennenbach told TheDC.

Ennenbach said the election judge, who she wouldn’t name, came to her after having witnessed busloads of mentally handicapped service workers, who are ineligible to vote per their medical condition, cast ballots during the timeframe when the verification system was down.

“The judges could not strike the vote because the verification system was down,” she said.

A piece of computer hardware failed on Election Day, preventing poll workers across Missouri from being able to access the central electronic database designed to verify voter registration information for part of the day.

One of the load balancers — a piece of computer hardware that manages Internet traffic by determining how requests are sent to servers — is to blame for the problems with the system, said Laura Egerdal, spokesperson for the Missouri Secretary of State.

That's an odd thing to have happen.

Ed's second claim is that it was inappropriate for recently appointed St. Louis City Board of Elections Democratic Chairwoman, Eileen McCann, to hire a security company with close ties to Congressman Carnahan. The only way that I see this as a problem is if they security company was hired to transport ballots. In the audio from Jamie Allman's show above, Ed mentions some politics within the Board of Elections that may be relevant.

On Wednesday, Martin’s team originally said a last-minute surge of Democratic votes from seven precincts looked suspicious, especially after he was leading most of the night. Now, though, after further investigation, his team discovered that the Democratic surge was from more than just the seven precincts – and he said that surge looks reasonable.

With that acknowledgement, it's hard for me to see how Ed can claim victory. Nonetheless, voters who have been disenfranchised or whose votes have been diminished by fraudulently cast ballots need someone to stand up for them. That person has to be Ed because the voters lack standing in court.

That said, we did identify 31 cases of registered voters who were possibly ineligible. And we know 8 that voted, at least one of which was not eligible to vote and should be taken from the rolls. That was based on just two locations. Because we had no villain, we held off reporting the information until after the election, as our plan was to work with cooperative election authorities rather than making a scandal out of what was really a systemic problem.

Robin Carnahan has stated in federal court that it is not her responsibility to clean the voter rolls, despite the violence done to honest elections during the time Missouri ACORN was active. Well, if Robin won't do it, then the people will do what government can't or won't do.

Perhaps Ed Martin's complaints about voter fraud will amount to nothing. That would be the best outcome. Due to our legal structure he's the only person with standing to bring these complaints and hopefully force greater scrutiny. To those that would nay-say his challenge, I would respectfully point out that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

1 comment:

It looks like Russ Carnahan was reelected to be the Representative for the Third Congressional District with the usual late vote tally from the City of St. Louis. Ed Martin is protesting the tally. Unfortunately, I do not believe anything will come of it. I sent off a letter to Tom Walsh and posted it to the discussion board in September when I found out the Association endorsed Russ Carnahan over Ed Martin. My question still remains, "What was the Association thinking when they endorsed Russ Carnahan?" Does it not trouble the Association that the votes Russ took regarding Obamacare, Cap and Trade, Financial (coercion) bill etc., which are DETRIMENTAL to the American citizens? Do you not question the $107 million of taxpayer's dollars he helped funnel to his brother Tom for his windfarm? Neither I nor Ed received a response from Tom about the endorsement. That is/was disappointing. I, along with Ed was asking the Association to at least talk to Ed to get his views on the issues first hand and then make an informed decision on whom to endorse. I do not understand the LOGIC of the Association's backing of Russ Carnahan. Not only for the reasons I mentioned above, which should be enough, but especially when Russ STOOPED so low with the SMEAR of Ed Martin regarding pedophile priests. These were FALSE accusations and the Post Disgrace endorsed Russ Carnahan claiming that he has CHARACTER. The Post, obviously does not know the meaning of the word, because with his SMEAR, Russ showed his LACK of character. After speaking with Ed the Association may have reconsidered the endorsement of Russ and then with the HELP of the SLPD there would have been a better outcome for the Third Congressional District. Anyway, if the vote count stands, Russ will be going back to Washington and be relegated to minority status in the US House and hopefully he will be FIRED in 2012. Greg Zotta Retired St. Louis Police Officer